Background
: Recently the elderly population have increased speedly, medical people are highly ineerested in health of the elderly. So, this study was executed to investigate dermographic characteristics of depression in the elderly.
Mothods : From March 1 to July 30 in 1994, the questionaires were distributed to 200 elderly people who were 65 years old or more and lived in urban and rural areas. Jerome A.Yesavage's Geriatric Depression Scale was used to know about the depression scale, and one can get every 1 point about 15 items. the group was divided into two groups. One was normal group which got from 0 point to 5 point, the other was depression group which got 6 points or more. Sex, religion, education level, occupation, living place, economic status, physical illness were studied. We performed sratistical analysis among the results by means of chisquare test and Chisquare trend test.

Results : There were 131 elderly who had depression among 200 elderly. In case of the older, separated, no occupation, the more retired years, the lower education level, the worse economic status, the smaller spending money per month, the lower of satisfaction degree about the spending money per month and the suporter was their offspring, the difference between Depression scale are 6 over and 5 below was statistically significant(p<0.001) and elderly female was also statiscally significant(p<0.05). There was no statiscally significant difference between depression scale are 6 over and 5 below in case of religion, living place, physical illness.

Conclusion : Depression of the aged are common illness, but it is a rare case that they see the doctors because of symptom.. Therefore, the primary care physician who take the primary care has to have concept about the factors influencing depression of the aged. I think it will be very helpful to the practice of the aged that use GDS as a screening test about the depression of the aged.